Gods, from your rocky home in the highest snow-capped Sierras of the imagination, swoop down now on San Francisco, the City of Perpetual Indulgence. Blot out all other sounds from your hearing and attend to the dark passage of one in your indifferent keeping — one touched by you, and like you, possessed....
Yet another turn of the wheel, another rotation of the earth: darkness is cast like a spell. A night without fog.
Straddling her snorting, fire-breathing Harley, Robin Flood roars up the steep undulating streets that slant to the sky and then down them to the Bay. She cuts a loud eructative path through the Marina and rumbles into stern Fort Mason, a former military facility converted into a cultural centre with shops, museums and a famous restaurant.
A bleached full moon leers down at her, one roguish lunar eyebrow cocked; clouds of galaxies extend from it into forever. The dark matter that makes up the unseen universe holds the stars apart. The Gods pay casual attention.
It is the beginning of November, final year of the century, on the night of the Spiral Dance — a Saturday night that falls on Samhain, when the dead pierce the veil that hangs between breathing and not, children who will never die (at least not in the twentieth, accursed century) eat sugar skulls, and a thousand boisterous pagans gather to celebrate the disappeared.
Robin joins the crowd cloaked in the exclusionary circle she draws around herself with strangers. She does not know anyone in the laughing, gesticulating, high-spirited gathering of animals with horns, birds of prey, devils of all designs, medieval jongleurs, Green Men, maenads and vampires. Here, New Agers rub shoulders with Dark Agers. Here, imagination expresses the divine with profligate abandon.
Robin regrets momentarily that she has not worn a costume, but her eyes attract more attention than a mask would: they are an unfathomable cerulean, like the sea. Her glance when unguarded can be frightening in what it reveals of the cold wildness inside. Her features are small and finely chiselled, her mouth wide and lush. Her hair is cropped like glossy black feathers. One seashell ear is studded with five expensive earrings, the kind ear-nibblers cut their lips on. She’s prettier than the Queen of Heaven tonight, but there is something indistinct, unformed, indefinable but dangerous about her, as if she might be willing to do anything.
Hidden behind their masks, people stare at her. Aware of the impression she makes, she tucks her ambient rage in a pocket of her black motorcycle jacket and grins like an ingenue on crack. She waits patiently in the line, examining everyone for signs of the roles they might play in the drama of her life. She has a hunger to find out who she is, and she can only learn this from others; she is unknown to herself. Tonight her whim is that she is a temple prostitute come to worship the Goddess, weep for her dead, and party down with the pagans. Her fantasies are usually realised.
The motley line snakes around the pier to Herbst Pavilion, a giant former troop embarkation shed surrounded by choppy Bay waters. The huge space is sombre and magnificent, a maritime cathedral filled with the anxious ghosts of the hundreds of thousands of apprehensive young men who passed through the building on their way to war, and the unhappy spirits of those who never sailed home. It is an appropriate place to celebrate Halloween.
After surrendering her ticket, Robin enters the Pavilion through a maze of long white curtains and is greeted by two beaming wood sprites in mossy green, and a motherly crone in a black bustier who speaks the traditional greeting, “Welcome home”, to her. Inside, Robin’s boot heels make dull clicking sounds on the concrete floor. She feels herself opening inside and decides to lift herself higher. Because pagans don’t drink or do drugs at public gatherings, she sneaks a few guilty hits from a roach and quickly waves the smoke away.
She is new to San Francisco, having lived in Paris for over a year, and before that in various university towns; now she is seeking out her own kind. She walks in the direction of the stage, looking frankly and openly at everyone she passes, wondering if the women she sees are turned on as she is. She imagines herself swimming alone in a great ocean of space more vast than whales could comprehend. Schools of fish move past her....
Because she stands alone, each pagan who enters sees in her a reflection of the goddess, dorsal view. She is small and slender, and her tight black vinyl pants offer the viewer who looks closely an unforgettable image of desire. She is posing, but lost in the pose so that she is unaware of the many who stream in, an endless cavalcade. They surround her, spreading blankets and placing cushions to sit on. A vulpine woman in a derby hat wearing a fake handlebar moustache nurses a baby from her fat hard breast, and Robin imagines squeezing that breast and making the milk stream into her own mouth.
A musician tuning up on stage breaks a guitar string, snapping her out of her wicked fantasy. A choir of witches is being assembled on the other end of the stage. Awkwardly, Robin folds herself in with her fellow beings, plugging into the building energy, feeling a charge of anticipation. The music gets better and louder. A few people dance half-heartedly and then sit back down. Robin moves to the apron of the stage and watches the people in charge. They prepare calmly and efficiently the myriad details of a Samhain ceremony for one thousand. They laugh easily with each other.
For a moment she fades into a memory of other ceremonies — Christian and far from joyous ones: pursed mouths, hell-fire and damnation voices, burning eyes, pinched souls. Blind faith in a book and man: her father, Thomas Flood.
A heavy touch on her shoulder startles her from this reverie. She recoils, about to snarl, but checks the impulse. Shivers.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The voice is obnoxiously self-confident. She turns and looks up at a well-browned, prime California hunk. She can tell he is a dedicated New Ager by his optimistic, sincere gaze and the t-shirt he is wearing, which boasts ‘A Higher Power Within’. Even his eyebrows are earnest strokes in his bland face. He wears loose pants, so she can’t see if he has genitals. She sneers, half-closing her eyes. If he came closer, she thinks she would bite his throat. Her hidden dark wings would unfold and envelop him, and she would soon have his blood on her tongue, running sweeter than semen down her throat.
But he keeps his distance and continues to talk. She sees that he will not be useful to her, that he is neither food nor fuck. He hears the echo of his own music, believes his own affirmations, and drops his shallow lines. She listens to him with the difficulty that even the hungry feel swallowing flies.
“Yes, my name’s Tom, you sweet goblin, but I won’t linger if you don’t want me to....” he finishes, aware she is not with him. His name is not the least of his offensiveness.
“I don’t want you to,” she says softly. He’s so dumb he still breathes through his mouth. Little gasps, as he tries to understand her.
He can’t decide how to respond. The turmoil on his face makes her smile at how easy it is to fuck men up. She sticks out her small hand as if in surrender. He takes it and she presses down on a judo point and he nearly faints.
She releases him. It is unsatisfying to inflict pain on someone she doesn’t know. He retreats with muttered imprecations indicating a lack of schooling and a deprived background.
The music from the stage insinuates its rhythms into her consciousness. The sound system is inadequate for the cavernous space, but the beat warms her. The band is playing, and a choir is singing an old pagan anthem. A bass drum booms as the divine array of mummers enters the hall and the magic show begins. First comes Cernunnos, the Celtic horned male god — she recognises him from her reading, and his identity is confirmed by the comments of people around her — striding with graceful giant steps on stilts taller than a tall man. He seems all-powerful and complete, his muscular acrobat’s body worthy of a god’s. The old god of the Underworld, the opener of the Gates of Life and Death.
His mask, Robin thinks, is terrifying. The stag’s antlers, the snake coiled around his neck are symbols she can read. He moves with grace and speed like a giraffe, accompanied by Apollo and Mercury, who move on their stilts with equal skill and assurance.
Robin is stirred to an emotion something like worship by this manifestation of the old gods. It is my birthright to worship, she thinks heretically. Perhaps it is my aesthetic, too. As a temple prostitute, perhaps it will be the Horned God himself to whom I will offer my tribute.
The fantasy pleases her. She is getting wet.
The lights dim and the crowd’s attention is focused on the pagan parade. Spotlights hit a troupe of beautiful naked dancers with painted bodies, their breasts bouncing, long hair whipping back and forth. Their movements are sexual and serpentine and joyful, drawing on the energy building in the great hall. They perform a ballet of orgasm; its explosive movements convey the sacredness of lust.
Robin looks away from the dancers for a moment, distracted by the dizzy argument of two greying lesbians, and when she looks again magic is happening, magic greater than her father’s Christian god has shown her in the twenty-six years since she was baptised.
Acrobats are descending on spidery ropes from the girders above and they seem to fall forever in slow motion while the excited crowd sets up a chant:
“Climb down, climb up!
Up to the bottom,
Down to the sky!”
Or so she hears. The words might have been different but she is transfixed by the acrobats, and cannot be certain of what she hears. She is in heat, glorious feline heat. She wonders, but only fleetingly, if her arousal is not simply keyed to the familiar pageantry of the circus, or to ceremonies she has attended in Catholic churches. But no: for the first time religion is part of her sexuality, not smothering it. The stilt walkers, dancers and acrobats are the gods who turn her on. The experience of conversion makes her tremble.
The music stops and the lights are lowered so that the crowd sits in darkness. There is a brief salutation to the four directions and the four elements, and then announcements are made from the stage. The purpose of the evening is to honour and mourn the dead who wait, in the minds of those who have gathered, just beyond the veil.
Candles are lit. A light show begins. Huge, breathtaking images of the beauty and brevity of life are projected on the walls and ceiling. Gaia, the blue planet, her jungles, forests, mountains and rivers of home; and then the faces of the beloved dead. The names of the dead, hundreds of them, are read by a woman with the voice of a doleful gatekeeper between the worlds. Most of the departed are unknown to Robin, but there are a few she recognises:
“Former President Jimmy Carter; Pinky Lee; Roy Rogers; the man known as Mr. Marvellous; Pat Robertson....” The list is endless, Robin thinks, like St. Peter reading the roll call at the Gates of Heaven. But the conjunction of famous names with one’s own dead creates the sense of a community of grief.
After twenty minutes of sitting cross-legged or standing with bowed head, Robin no longer hears the names. She is restless, perhaps because she finds it so difficult to honour her own dead. Her anger prevents her tears from falling. Half aloud, she calls out to her mother. In her mind is stamped the image of the crematory flames that reduced her mother to bone fragments and white dust. Her mother who had been so alive eaten by the flames.
“Gods rest the soul of Rebecca Flood!”— loudly, to no one, and then the rest came, the bitter memories spilling forth.
“You left. You left me to him. You thought I would be kept safe, but you were never safe from him. The Devil!”
The author of her being, Robin’s father, the Reverend Thomas Flood, said that her mother was not good, but bad; not a real mother or wife, but a slut, a whore of Babylon — a thing from the black pit flown up to liquefy his soul and drink it like blood. And Robin, eight years old at the time of her mother’s death, was afraid he was right.
Wasn’t he her flesh and blood, who seemed to sit at the right hand of God? Who actually talked with God?
Her mother’s spirit whispers in her ear:
“He killed me. He entered my body in the night not like a man but a devil. He went all the way inside and I couldn’t get him out, so I had to run...but by then he was always right there inside me, choking me. You are not safe while he is alive.”
Hot tears form. Robin lets them roll down her face and jacket and onto her hands, which she lifts in helpless offering to her mother and to the careless cruel gods.
The crowd quiets its wailing and grieving when a tall woman with a midwestern accent begins speaking, in a mellifluous storyteller’s voice, of the pagan legends. She guides them in a meditation, taking them with her across the River Styx, showing them Atlantis and Avalon, the Isle of Apples.
“You have come a long way, and it has been a difficult journey. Life has been a search through many lands, and now you have come home.”
Her words entrance the crowd. They are beautiful words, but Robin — burned out forever on sermons — tunes her out. It is not for her, this mass prayer, this journey with a thousand others.
Sex and sex alone is her salvation. When she falls on her knees, she worships Priapus.
Since childhood, during sermons she has masturbated without touching herself. Simply by contracting her pubococcygeus muscle she can pleasure herself without anyone knowing. Between her vagina and her anus she bears down and squeezes. The erotic intensity of the sensation between her legs can bring her to orgasm. This private act of subversion has kept her sane through years of Sunday School, sermons and crusades.
So sex has become entwined with religious ceremony for her. But what in the past had been a method of avoiding a religion of pain is transformed tonight into a way of accepting a spiritual movement that respects the earth and its gifts. The Christianity her father preached sanctioned the rape of the earth because his flock would all ascend to heaven.
So Robin wriggles her pelvis imperceptibly as she sits cross-legged, paying no attention to the meditation that so absorbs her fellow pagans. She wonders if they are listening or if they too are masturbating. She wonders if this isn’t how most people — women at least — endured church: each secretly playing with herself, pressing the pleasure button. Perhaps masturbation was the true secret of worship.
After all, it would be the most wonderful hypocrisy — and she had become a connoisseur of hypocrisy by watching her father tend his flock. The simulation of virtue is the tribute Eros pays normality, but Robin’s motto since college has been ‘kill normality before it kills you’.
The long meditation ends. People stand and stretch, feeling at one with each other. They have raised some magic together while peering through the veil. Robin feels it moving around the people near her. Then the music starts up and the communicant pagans are told to form a giant circle around the outer perimeter of the great space and join hands with people on each side.
This is not to be done lightly, Robin knows. She looks for a man and a woman who interest her. By her secret use of it, she has made her vagina the centre of her being: they must be sexy.
Most of them look too nice. Nice is a look Robin fears because it’s the look of the self-deluded. Her father’s mask when he wasn’t being stern. The women are earth mothers, even the leather dykes; the men for the most part wear compassionate, caring looks. They bore her. Their sincerity scares her.
Her eye is caught by a tall middle-aged blonde woman with a knowing smile and something — Defiance? Mischief? — in her green eyes that Robin responds to. She is wearing a denim shirt open to display her brown breasts, and a short black leather skirt with black stockings on strong, youthful legs. A necklace of claws circles her throat. When she smiles, which she does often, Robin sees that her fangs have been filed into points. A diamond glistens on one of them.
Yes, this one can teach me something, Robin thinks to herself. Standing next to her is an equally tall man with a fringe of black beard, no moustache, who balances precariously on his only leg. He seems amused by his problems with balance. He is striking in the way young men can be who have survived something more trying than college.
Robin slips between them and takes their hands. They accept her easily, as an unanticipated gift.
“I’m Robin. Can I dance with you?”
The tall blonde smiles. “Join us, Robin. I’m Laura. And this is Stump.”
“Captain Stump,” the tall man corrects. “If I start to fall, I’ll have to rely on your strength. Are you strong?”
“Strong enough,” Robin replies.
The line starts to move, the pressure of linked hands pulling and stretching it.
“It’s my first celebration,” Robin confides to Laura. “What kind of dance is this?”
“I think of it as the dance of the DNA. We move around in a double helix. You’ll see.”
The line surges, and Robin feels the electricity of the crowd passing through her hands, from Laura’s slender ringed feminine hands with long nails like talons, and the strong smooth hands of the man with one leg. She feels supported, part of the strand of rhythmic, celebratory life.
The beauty of the Spiral Dance is that everyone in the line passes before Robin’s eyes. She sees every single smiling face. Some are in tears at the experience. The varieties of people and their sexualities as they flow around the room is like watching the past, present and future at the same moment.
Stump’s grip tightens and loosens as he deftly balances himself, but his dependency is not demanding.
“My leg was stolen by some evil trickster,” he explains to her during a pause in the dance. “I left it standing against a chair in the movie last night.”
Was he crazy? He laughs at her puzzlement.
“I took off my prosthesis because my stump ached. I usually take it off at the movies, and then if I have to go to the bathroom I just hop there with my cane. I’ve gotten good at that. Well, last night I got back to my seat — right on the aisle — and it was gone. My leg! Who would steal a leg but some coyote? An artificial leg!” He chuckles, as if losing a prosthetic limb was to be expected in a life where you could lose a leg so easily.
As the pagans dance, they sing a pagan anthem:
“We are a circle, with no beginning and never ending....”
Their faces are open, and the clean sexual light shines through them — unlike the church faces Robin had grown up with, sombre and closed. Despite her reserve, she is seduced into imagining that she is one of them. The faster the line moves — until it is like playing crack-the-whip — the more Robin feels her resistance leaving her. Her face is flushed and she is singing. There was nothing like the freedom of this whirling connection with the life force.
Laura yells to her to be heard over the crowd: “It’s high energy, isn’t it? Like sex with angels.”
She nods and smiles back at Laura, whose fangs seem improbably sharp to Robin. She imagines them in her neck and feels a rush of desire. The frisson of fear that follows adds to the sensation, as do her memories of old movies in which vampires bend exaggeratedly over their pale victims, mouths buried in virginal necks.
The music stops and so do the dancers, although the dance goes on echoing in their minds. Robin braces herself against Stump’s strong tug as he lowers himself to the floor — he sprawls, leg akimbo, head thrown back, ecstatic. Laura hugs Robin and they stand together belly to belly, breathing hard. They are sisters in that moment. Laura’s breath in Robin’s nostrils dizzies her, but she does not pull away as she normally would.
Then Laura grinds her pubic bone against Robin’s hip and gasps with pleasure. Around them the crowd of pagans is separating into individuals who see that it’s getting late. They make preparations to leave, many exchanging phone numbers and hugging like Laura and Robin.
“I want you,” Laura murmurs in Robin’s ear. Robin feels the older woman’s warm breath on her neck and anticipates what doesn’t come.
“You want my blood, Laura? Or is it my soul you want?”
“I want to see blood trickling over your nipples. You’re too young to have a soul.”
“Where can we go?” The heat is spreading from Robin’s centre and creating an urgency of need.
“Not here, not tonight. But come to see me.” She slips a card into Robin’s pocket. They cling together until Laura kisses Robin on the lips and they step apart. No tongue; not yet.
Robin feels a hand on her leg. It is Stump asking to be helped up. The two of them pull him to a standing position and he puts his arm around Laura’s neck and smiles sweetly.
“I’d do anything if you’d touch me like that,” he says to both of them. Laura reaches into his shirt and pinches his nipples.
He smiles impishly at first but then she uses her long nails and he screws up his face in pleasure-pain and groans happily.
“I’d do anything,” he says pleadingly to Robin, who feels generous and slaps him hard. “I worship you,” he says self-mockingly, hand to his cheek.
“Tomorrow?” Robin says to Laura, then remembers, “No, I can’t come tomorrow. I’m going to have a tattoo done on my back. Star is finishing a design.”
“I can’t wait to see it.”
“You’ll be the first,” Robin promises, feeling flirtatious and frustrated at the same time. They kiss again, like sisters, but wicked sisters: the points of their tongues touch.
“Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again,” Stump says to Robin as he and Laura move away from her towards the exit. Robin remains where she is while around her the stilt walkers, the dancers and the acrobats, their bodies glistening, don street clothes and straggle towards the exit. Acrobats descend down ropes from the girders high above and land near her.
They are like angels visiting earth, Robin thinks. One bounces to the concrete floor before Robin. He is a muscular Chinese man with a long thin black moustache and glossy black hair worn back in a pony tail. His chest is flat and there is a bird unlike any Robin has seen tattooed between his nipples.
“Hello,” he says to Robin, who stares back at him, hypnotised. He is handsome, this angel with the watchful eyes of an animal.
“I watched you,” he tells her, “from up there.”
“I don’t think I like that.”
“I was getting into you, that’s all. When I’m swinging up there I pick one person to look at so I don’t get dizzy when I look down.”
“What’s it like to be up there?”
“What’s it like to be in heaven? It’s wonderful. I want to stay up there all the time. Want to come up with me?”
“I can’t climb like you.”
“Don’t worry. I have a friend. Come.”
He leads her by the hand to the thick rope he descended on.
“Just hold onto my waist.” At his signal they are in the air.
His muscular arms enfold her and they are lifted from the shed floor to the girders, high, high over the heads of the departing crowd. The rope swings with their combined weight.
Looking down sends a tingle through every cell in her body. She is helpless. Her body is in the keeping of a god, who has manifested himself in the form of a Chinese acrobat. There is nothing she can do but realise the fantasy she brought to the Spiral Dance. His hard body pressed against hers has caused her every nerve ending to throb, her nipples to harden, the muscles in her thighs to flutter. She wants him, to suck and bite and fuck.
“I want you,” he said, as Laura had. But there is a hard male urgency in his voice that will not wait for another day. The temple prostitute has been chosen. His strong hands touch her everywhere, squeezing her breasts, cupping her buttocks and pulling her into him as he thrusts against her.
He lowers her carefully onto the steel girder, which is just wide enough for her to lie back on as he tugs off her vinyl pants and then plunges his head between her slender thighs.
He licks her bare pubic mound, running his tongue in little circles around her wet slit before pulling it open with delicate fingers so he can take her clitoris in his lips and gently suck it, while one finger explores her contracting vagina. She feels his little finger in her anus, pressing up against the finger stabbing now into her vagina, while his other hand moves up her body to caress first her breasts and then stroke her mouth, demanding that she suck on his fingers, that she surrender to his power.
She cannot move for fear of falling from the girder. She is a helpless sacrifice to his lust, and she wouldn’t have it any other way; but she wants to see his penis. She needs him to move up on her so she can feel its hardness on her body, but he won’t stop sucking her and teasing her, making her lick his hard fingers. He won’t give his maleness until he has torn an orgasm from her throat, until he hears her cry out, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” and he rises on his knees to show her the gift he brings her. His liquid black eyes bulge with the strength of his desire. His penis is not long but it is thick and purple with engorged blood. His face is shiny with her juices and on his mouth is the stamp of the satyr.
It is a slick spear he holds and brings to the hunger between her thighs, slowly so she must beg for it, beg to be sacrificed to Cernunnos. When she is pricked by his spear she thrusts herself up so he can impale her up to the hilt of his pubic bone.
She is filled with the god, and he is moving inside her with the divine sexual energy of a god, his hands clasping now her waist, now her buttocks, so that there is no escape from the satisfying savagery of his attack.
Her need matches his and then surpasses it. She feels herself losing touch with any last remnant of reality. Above her, girders buttress the black roof, while far below mere mortals clear the floor of sound equipment and decorations. She is suspended in space and time while the god Cernunnos gives her the divine gift of the strongest orgasm she’s ever experienced. She’s coming and crying out “Hail, Cernunnos!” again and again until nothing comes from her throat but sighs, and she floats back into her consciousness, thinking:
I am such a slut.